Our rights, the rights of “we” the people, deserve to be afforded not by gender, religion, love or belief but because we are share the commonalities of a human existence upon this earth. Today, we stand to defend that right as gender neutral and call upon our fellow citizens to move forward with the Equal Rights Amendment, to ensure that protection.

“Women, and men, in America are faced with a Congress and state legislators who are focused like a laser on attacking women’s health. We have a new Supreme Court Justice and, as such, many questions about issues of gender equality hanging in the balance. The President’s ongoing executive actions threatening to rollback back all of our hard-won rights, including his reinstatement and expansion of the Global Gag Rule on the day after the 44th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, make ratification of the ERA more important than ever,” Rep. Speier said.

“When asked, 96 percent of Americans think that women and men should have equal rights, and 88 percent believe that our Constitution should affirm those rights, while 72 percent of Americans mistakenly believe the Constitution already includes such a guarantee,” Rep. Speier said. “Given the current political climate, and the overwhelming support, it’s clear that the ERA is still a necessity. As the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explained in a Supreme Court opinion, ‘Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t.’”

In 1923, on the 75th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, Alice Paul first announced the ERA. This amendment was introduced in every session of Congress from 1923, until it passed in 1972. Thirty-five states ratified the ERA before the deadline, falling just three states short of the number needed for passage. That is why Congresswoman Speier’s joint resolution follows the “three-state” approach to ratification of the ERA, which would strike the expired deadline and restart the “ratification clock” so that the amendment would become part of the Constitution after the needed three states are secured. Efforts to secure those states are already underway in Illinois, Nevada, and Virginia. Once ratified, the ERA would specify in an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of sex.”

Find out whether your member of Congress has co-sponsored the bill to remove the deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment.